Tomb Raider’s creators on how the game changed their lives: ‘Skint staff were suddenly pulling up in sports cars’
‘Giving Lara Croft pistols meant we could show off her acrobatics. And when she goes to Peru, we threw in a T rex!’ I joined Core Design in the summer of 1994 and met Toby Gard, who showed me his concept sketches for Tomb Raider. He’d already come up with the title and drawn a mock-up box cover with a woman holding two pistols.
Key points
- Tomb Raider was developed by Core Design in Derby and released in 1996.
- Lara Croft was originally Latina before becoming a British aristocrat.
- The team worked until 2 or 3am daily for nearly a year to finish the game.
Tomb Raider's creators have described how making the game changed their lives, in an account published by the Guardian. The game was developed by Core Design at a Victorian building on Ashbourne Road in Derby, with the team working until 2 or 3am every day, including weekends, for much of a year.
The creators said they never expected the game to become such a success. One recalled that people who had been broke were soon buying sports cars, and that royalties allowed them to buy a house.
How Lara Croft took shape
Lara was initially conceived as a Latina character with a more realistic, almost androgynous appearance. The team changed her physique to suit more stylised movement, and she became a British mercenary and then, through scriptwriter Vicky Arnold, an aristocrat who hunts historical artefacts for fun.
The creators settled on four pillars: platforming, puzzles, combat and story. They narrowed a long list of archaeological locations, including Petra and Angkor Wat, to Peru, Greece, Egypt and Atlantis, and added a T rex to the Peru section.
People who were skint before were suddenly pulling up in sports cars.
— a Tomb Raider creator
Marketing and mixed feelings
The publisher, Eidos Interactive, focused on Lara rather than the game, which one creator said was the right call but went too far in some marketing campaigns. The creator said the campaigns showed "a lack of imagination by oversexualising her", while believing the game's quality spoke for itself.
The team measured movement using a hopscotch grid in the car park, making Lara three paces tall and each environment block four paces. Giving her pistols let the team show off her acrobatics, and the creators said being pursued by animals was scarier than gunfire.
